Sunday, January 22, 2017

Nearly all American politicians lie, but few as blatantly as those affiliated with the present administration. How do they do it? Are they lacking a conscience? Do they believe their own lies? Do they start with small falsehoods, stretch the truth, reinterpret events, and finally graduate to verifiably false statements?

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said, contradicting all available data.

Crowds on the National Mall just before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 (left) and Barack Obama’s in 2009.

Photograph: Reuters.

Here are three major points from an astute analysis of why the first press conference of the Trump administration was such a bizarre sham:

1. Establishing a norm with the press: they will be told things that are obviously wrong and they will have no opportunity to ask questions. ...

2. Increasing the separation between Trump's base (1/3 of the population) from everybody else (the remaining 2/3). ...

3. Creating a sense of uncertainty about whether facts are knowable, among a certain chunk of the population... ...

Is there a “slippery slope”? The notorious academic fraudster Diederik Stapel describes his descent from respectable social psychologist to data fabricator:

After years of balancing on the outer limits, the grey became darker and darker until it was black, and I fell off the edge into the abyss. I’d been having trouble with my experiments for some time. Even with my various “grey” methods for “improving” the data, I wasn’t able to get the results the way I wanted them. I couldn’t resist the temptation to go a step further. I wanted it so badly. I wanted to belong, to be part of the action, to score.
. . .

I opened the file with the data that I had entered and changed an unexpected 2 into a 4; then, a little further along, I changed a 3 into a 5. It didn’t feel right. I looked around me nervously. The data danced in front of my eyes.
. . .

No. I clicked on “Undo Typing.” And again. I felt very alone. I didn’t want this. I’d worked so hard. I’d done everything I could and it just hadn’t quite worked out the way I’d expected. It just wasn’t quite how everyone could see that it logically had to be. I looked at the door of my office. It was still closed. I looked out the window. It was dark outside. “Redo Typing.”

Most of us never reach the abyss of Diederik Stapel or Sean Spicer. Or the average politician:

"People want their politicians to lie to them. The reason that people want their politicians to lie them is that people care about politics," said Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. "You understand that Washington is a dirty place and that lying is actually very helpful to get your policies implemented."

But we all lie to some extent. “Why yes, that outfit looks great on you” when we really mean to say, “Well, it's not the most flattering ensemble.” White lies like these are meant to spare another person's feelings, and can be considered a norm of politeness. But do small lies desensitize us to any negative feelings that may ensue, and make it easier to tell more substantial lies in the future?

In the study, the subjects viewed pictures of jars filled with pennies. The experimental set-up involved the subjects in the role of 'Advisor' and confederates in the role of 'Estimator'. The Advisors got a better and longer look at the jars and relayed their estimated count to the confederates, who in turn guessed the number of pennies in each jar. The players were told that at the end of the experiment, one trial would be randomly selected and both parties would be paid according to how accurate the Estimator had been on that trial. Then the Advisor was privately told that the final payment did not depend on accuracy, but the Estimator didn't know this.

The Advisor was also told that the incentive structure would be manipulated, but the Estimator didn't know this, either. Dishonesty about the amount of money in the jar (overestimation) could benefit the participant at the expense of their partner (self-serving/other-harming), benefit both (self-serving/other-serving), benefit the partner at the expense of the participant (self-harming/other-serving), or a baseline condition where it would benefit neither. There were 60 trials of each, in four separate blocks, to track any changes in dishonesty over time.

A total of 55 volunteers performed the task, with 25 of them participating in the fMRI portion of the study. The behavioral results were collapsed across all 55 participants and were not reported separately for the fMRI subjects. As expected, dishonesty escalated across the course of the blocks that were self-serving, to a greater extent for self-serving/other-harming (green) than for self-serving/other-serving (purple).

But in general, this wasn't an overly selfish bunch of people. The participants started at a dishonesty level of £4 when out for only themselves, compared to £12 when it benefited them as well as their partners. Altruistic dishonesty, you might say.

What about the neuroimaging results? Were there brain regions that tracked the subtle increase in dishonesty? The authors selected their regions of interest (ROI) via Neurosynth, an online meta-analytic framework based on words that appear in a huge database of articles. The search term they used was “emotion”, which is rather general now isn't it. The rationale for this choice was that (1) people show increased emotional arousal when dishonest; and (2) responses to emotional stimuli diminish with repeated presentation (variously known as habituation, repetition suppression, or adaptation).

It wasn't clear to me why the authors didn't conduct a whole-brain analysis in the first place; they treated it as an “exploratory analysis”.1And the emotion ROI was basically the amygdala.My Cousin Amygdala had an opinion about this.

"When we lie for personal gain, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that limits the extent to which we are prepared to lie," explains senior author Dr Tali Sharot (UCL Experimental Psychology). "However, this response fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls the bigger our lies become. This may lead to a 'slippery slope' where small acts of dishonesty escalate into more significant lies."

Would I Lie to You About Lie Adaptation?

But it's not that simple. Amygdala activity ≠ negative feeling. The senior author certainly knows this, since her previous work linked amygdala activity to optimism, of all things (Sharot et al., 2007). 2 The CNN report on the study had a silly eye-rolling title, but they did interview an independent expert, to their credit.

[Lisa Feldman Barrett] says focusing on the amygdala as the brain's source of emotion may be misguided.

Hand-selected, meta-analyses of brain mapping data, as opposed to results spit out by Neurosynth, she says, have shown that the amygdala is not necessarily critical for emotion.
. . .

Barrett said she also wonders if the research results would hold outside a laboratory's doors.

"They did not reward or punish for lying, whereas there is always a payoff or risk in real life," she said. "That might cause the amygdala to maintain its engagement."

All of this said, Barrett said she doesn't doubt that habituation plays a part in lying. She just isn't sure this new research, pointing to the amygdala as the source of emotion, focuses on the correct cause.

A very high-stakes real life experiment would put the most egregious public liars in a scanner during a simulated press conference or a late night bout of tweeting to see what happens when the falsehoods get more and more preposterous.

There is no such thing as “alternative facts.” Do not become desensitized to bald-faced lies.

7 Comments:

The argument surrounding the DC crowd size is pointless since, like sex, timing in photography is so important. To clarify, let me point out that the photos presented in your argument do not indicate time of day, nor is there any reference to the activities taking place on the podium...critical omissions that leave your assumptions lacking. Was Trump speaking when that picture was taken? Was Obama on the podium when that photo was snapped 8 years ago? Prove it. When addressing inflammatory arguments one must be very precise. Pundits and members of the media, those that call themselves journalists, are an embarrassment by my standard. Now you have political figures and media twisting reality. I know. I made my living as a TV journalist through-out the 60's and 70's. Murry Ferris; KXLY-TV; KWTV; KMBC-TV.

"A combination of photos taken at the National Mall shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (L) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009, in Washington."

"To be fair, the crowd looked big from Trump’s vantage point at the Capitol. But that’s also a terrible way to estimate crowd size."

Here’s an image of the National Mall during Trump’s inaugural address, taken from the National Park Service’s EarthCam on the Washington Monument at 12:09 pm ET on Friday, right around when the swearing-in began.

Good information, thank you. These data verify the claims made by many in the media who failed to include them in their coverage. Had they all reported the photo acquisitions accurately much of the bickering might have been alleviated. Another part of a story might have been how irrelevant crowd size is to the outcome of an electoral vote.

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About Me

Born in West Virginia in 1980, The Neurocritic embarked upon a roadtrip across America at the age of thirteen with his mother. She abandoned him when they reached San Francisco and The Neurocritic descended into a spiral of drug abuse and prostitution. At fifteen, The Neurocritic's psychiatrist encouraged him to start writing as a form of therapy.